


The American(s)

by qqueenofhades



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Angst, Arranged Marriage, Bittersweet Ending, F/M, No Really Pain, Strangers to Lovers, The Americans AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 08:25:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14849211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qqueenofhades/pseuds/qqueenofhades
Summary: The Americans-inspired AU. As part of a top-secret government project, Garcia Flynn and Lucy Preston are matched up in 2010 and sent to live as a married couple in 1969, fighting a shadowy organization known as Rittenhouse for decades in suburban Cold War-era America. Their allies and their enemies are powerful and uncertain, and the only thing they can trust is each other. But in a spy game with deadly stakes, there is no way to know if that, and they, will be enough.





	The American(s)

  **I.**

Garcia Flynn and Lucy Preston meet in the year 2010, in a secured military facility somewhere on the East Coast of America. He is Croatian, thirty-five, an ex-NSA asset, private security contractor, and long-time soldier of a variety of guerrilla campaigns in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Chechnya. She is American, twenty-seven, and has just completed a PhD in history and anthropology of American political movements at Stanford University, after a glittering academic career all through, and until recently was tipped for a prestigious faculty job or research fellowship. They are here because they have been recruited for a top-secret government task force called Project Retro. Or rather, recruited themselves; they’re about the only applicants in the dozen-strong pool who unanimously, unambiguously want to be here. They have their reasons. Like everything else right now, those are classified.

They have been put through a battery of physical and psychological tests. Their backgrounds have been scrutinized with a fine-tooth comb and they’ve been questioned for hours on every lacuna or irregularity, until their handlers are satisfied that every i has been dotted and every t crossed. It’s not clear which DoD branch is running this project. CIA, FBI, Homeland Security? Some monstrous hybrid? Nobody from anywhere seems to have enough clearance to know about all of it. Project Retro is too off-the-map for that. And given what it’s asking, it needs to be stringent. These dozen are the last men and women standing from an original intake of over five hundred. They’ve dropped out, or withdrawn themselves from consideration once the commitment became clear, or just didn’t cut it. Now it’s this.

Garcia (or Flynn, as he generally prefers to be known, an old soldier’s reflex) and Lucy first lay eyes on each other in a sterile white room. The interviews and psych assessments and simulations and grueling fitness tests have been completed, and they’ve been selected as the most compatible partners for each other. It’s hard to know how to greet a person in this situation. They’re total strangers, have maybe glanced at each other once or twice, but that’s it. They have never had a conversation. The brass hasn’t wanted to influence the results, or have anyone putting in a personal preference. They get who they are assigned. End of story.

“I’m Garcia,” he says. He’s six-foot-four, and he has to look down – well down – at this tiny five-foot-five historian, who looks back at him with a cool, unrevealing expression. “I’m pleased to – ”

“We can’t use our real names.” She gives him a warning look, as if to remind him that they have both read the dossiers, they have been memorizing their false identities for a week now, and she can’t countenance this rookie mistake right out of the gate. “Try that again.”

He clears his throat. Pauses, then says, “I’m Alexander Mueller.”

“I’m Victoria Taylor, but you can call me Vicky.” She says it easily, so much that he half-believes it. “Can I call you Alex?”

“Sure.” He glances around, wondering if he would be asking her to sit down if this actually was their first date. There’s only an uncomfortable-looking white linoleum couch, but he beckons her toward it. “Where are you from, Vicky?”

“Massachusetts.” She manages to put just the hint of an authentic Boston nasality into it. “I was born there in 1942, while my father was serving in the 101st Airborne in World War II. I grew up in Springfield and went to Wellesley. How about you?”

“I was born in Germany in 1933.” A wry raise of an eyebrow acknowledges that is, of course, an ominous date. “I lost my parents in the bombing of Dresden in 1945 and immigrated to America a year later, where I was adopted by a couple in Chicago. Managed to learn English and graduate high school with honors, then go to Harvard. We met in Boston Common in 1965. Had some of the same friends and participated in the same anti-war causes.”

Lucy raises an eyebrow, as if to say that she’s pleased he has in fact done his homework, but he can leave some for her. “Yes,” she says. “We didn’t get along at first, but we eventually realized we had a lot in common, and started dating. You asked me to marry you last year, while we were participating in the May ‘68 movements in France. We’ve come home and decided to settle down, though we’re still prone to the odd spot of social activism. But we’ve gotten ordinary jobs in Virginia, at a travel agency, and just bought our first house.”

Flynn nods, as that concords with everything he’s read. They could sit here quizzing each other on these people they’re supposed to embody, to become so thoroughly as to forget they ever were anyone else, but it seems clear that they have it down. They sit there in awkward silence. They can’t ask any personal questions about their old lives, or why they have agreed to do this, or why they want to take Rittenhouse down. They have a thick manila envelope of instructions, which they are supposed to read and memorize word-perfect and then destroy, and a folder apiece with the supporting documents for Alexander Mueller and Victoria Taylor. In a moment, they are going to go out of here and get their suitcases and get dressed in their vintage clothes, and then they are going to step into a time machine. They are going to travel to the year 1969, and they are going to live there for – well, for as long as it takes. Project Retro is not just a figure of speech. In fact, the furthest thing from it.

There is some uncertainty about traveling back to a time when they have already been born. Flynn was born in 1975, so he has six years, and Lucy in 1983, so she has the longest. The only rule is that you can’t go anywhere you might meet yourself, you can’t change any events in your own life or those of your ancestors, and you can’t, obviously, tell anyone who you really are. You are there to conduct ultra-classified, high-level operations against a shadowy secret society known as Rittenhouse, which is deeply embedded into all levels of American politics and government, and particularly so in the 1970s and 80s. Presidents Nixon and Reagan are both charter members, and there is untold damage that could still be done. Flynn and Lucy are going to live as an entirely ordinary, all-American married couple, and fight them before they get really entrenched, on whatever front is presented. They just happen to be time-traveling spies and saboteurs who will be imprisoned and/or killed, or worse, if they’re ever caught, are going to leave the present with no guarantee of ever seeing it again, and have been instructed that nothing, nothing, comes between them and the mission. Strictly speaking, they are and will only ever be co-workers. But given what they have to do, that’s going to become complicated in a hurry.

Flynn walks out onto the floor of the warehouse in a brown corduroy suit and paisley collared shirt, because the sixties are an abortion of a fashion decade and at least he only has one year to put up with it before they hit the seventies, which are even worse. He has aviator sunglasses and a battered old suitcase, which contains everything he’s taking with him. Lucy has an appropriately elevated hairdo, a sweater set and A-line skirt and heels, and a slightly nicer suitcase, as they shake hands with the brass and are told that their handler, Denise Christopher, will arrive in a few years. She will make contact with them at that time, and begin to instruct them on their first missions. In the meantime, Alex and Vicky Mueller are expected to settle down in suburban Alexandria, in the DC commuter belt, and begin building their lives, with everything that entails. Are they clear?

“Yes,” Flynn says.

“Yes,” Lucy says.

(This definitely isn’t the time for second thoughts. Good thing they don’t have them.)

They start toward the time machine, though with a brief sensation that they’re being watched from the walkway overhead. When Lucy looks up, she sees someone in the shadows from the heavy industrial pipes, frowns, and feels as if their name is on the tip of her tongue. But she can’t see their face, and they turn away, and then the next moment, she has reached the machine and is climbing inside. They’re riding double with Rufus and Jiya, another coupled pair of agents, on their way to assume the identities of Frank and Betty Young in Los Angeles, California. As a black man and the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, they’re relieved about avoiding a posting in the South. Given when they’re going, this makes sense.

Flynn and Lucy sit down, and she briefly fumbles with her seatbelt, trying to sort out the straps and buckles. Flynn leans forward and does it for her, and Lucy isn’t sure what to say. She has no idea who this man is. Now she’s going to be living with him for possibly the rest of her life. They are not handing out any guaranteed return tickets. The idea is that you’ll eventually live back to the present anyway, if you’re so lucky.

If you’re so lucky.

Lucy clutches the straps of the belt, thinks about Amy, and doesn’t look back.

**II.**

Their wedding night is spent in a Super-8 motel in Arlington, with grimy neon light slanting in the windows and the rattling of the old air conditioner. Everything seems to be done in varying shades of yellow. Their marriage certificate sits on the table, signed by a justice of the peace earlier, and they managed to do a decent job of smiling and acting excited at the ceremony (their good friends Frank and Betty Young standing as witnesses, before they headed to the airport for the long trip to their new home). Lucy keeps looking at her new wedding ring. It feels odd and alien on her finger. Flynn seems more used to wearing one.

“We can’t talk about ourselves,” she says, as they’re sitting side by side on the double bed and have gotten halfway through a pack of cigarettes, because it’s the sixties and everyone smokes. It curls blue and lacelike in the dim air. It’s June in the South, and even with the efforts of the window unit, it’s hot and sticky. Her blouse is open several buttons, and Flynn is his undershirt, perspiration gleaming on their throats and shoulders. She has scraped off her stockings, and she pokes a bare foot into the sheets. “But we’re partners. We have to trust each other even without that. So. Can I?”

Flynn looks at her with a singular, unblinking intensity. Then he nods once.

“Okay.” Lucy reaches for the glass of bourbon on the side table, as he takes his own, and they clink them in a brief, wry toast. They sip, looking at each other. There is the awareness that at some point, they are going to have to do this (and do it) for the first time. They are married now. It is also expected that at some point, they will have children. When that is, they can decide, but Denise will probably want to hear about their ordinary family life when she arrives in 1972. There has to be no doubt that they are anyone but who they say.

 “To Victoria,” Flynn says, startling her. He takes a final drag on his cigarette, then stubs it out. “Mrs. Mueller.”

 _Mrs. Mueller._ Lucy has practiced writing it several times like a dreamy schoolgirl, which she’s not, and signing it as second nature. There’s just enough of a wistfulness in Flynn’s tone, an ache in his eyes, the way his thumb circles the wedding ring over and over, that she breaks rule number one. “Were you – ?”

“Yes.” Flynn keeps staring at the water-stained plaster on the far wall. “She and our child died last year.”

Lucy winces. “Did they – ?” 

“They were murdered.” Flynn still doesn’t look at her. “You can guess by who.”

Lucy can, at that. She draws her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, feeling the weight of everything she would like to say, even to this man that she doesn’t know from Adam. All those tests and interviews and profiles have to be good for something, right? He was supposed to be her best match. Their relationship, above all, has to remain functional, even as they may have to pretend to be any number of other people, have to become adept with wigs and disguises and changing their mannerisms and names as needed, all the tradecraft of spies. Flynn is already under strict orders to Americanize his accent, as much as possible. His German cover story gives some justification for it, but still.

After another pause, Lucy decides to hell with it. She unbuttons her blouse and shrugs it off, then her bra. She is making no attempt at seduction or being leisurely about it. This is a work-related event, and she stands up, unbuttons her skirt, and slides it off her legs, followed by her panties. Flynn is still sitting on the bed, looking briefly startled by the turn that things have taken, but he is likewise a professional. He gets up and undresses just as economically, until they are standing naked on the rough shag carpet, looking at each other. He raises his hands and slowly takes hold of her upper arms. Can doubtless feel the gooseflesh that raises in spite of herself, at being touched in a strange room by a strange man, and his mouth quirks briefly. As if he thinks she might be scared, he says, “I’ll be gentle.”

Lucy isn’t altogether sure that gentle is what she wants, or quite what either of them can stand. She rises on her tiptoes and pulls his mouth down to hers, kisses him roughly and almost misses. He wraps his arms around her waist, and carries her to the bed.

It’s… not much. It really couldn’t be otherwise. They manage to make things fit, and it feels intermittently good by the laws of rubbing certain parts on each other, and they do their best. But it’s still perfunctory sex with a stranger, and when Flynn closes his eyes and moves harder inside her, it’s pretty clear that it’s not her he’s imagining. Not that she resents it. It’s entirely understandable if he was widowed just a year ago, and is forced into this new museum-diorama life with another woman, decades away from his own time in a secret government spy ring, all to get revenge on Rittenhouse.

They ruin lives, Lucy thinks. They ruin everyone’s lives.

They may be her family, but she has to destroy them too.

The next morning, Flynn says, “I want to go to Houston.”

“Houston?” Lucy rolls over in her silk slip and winces at the sunlight, getting up to see about doing her hair and lipstick. She doesn’t mind, ordinarily, though she certainly has to be conscientious about looking properly put together. “Why?”

Flynn shrugs. “Rittenhouse might target the moon landing, don’t you think?”

True, as that’s only a month from now and it’s certainly something that they can profitably interfere with, but it’s not in any of their dossiers that they’re supposed to be going there, and Lucy is fairly sure he’s trying to sneak in an off-the-books mission already. She rolls her stockings over her legs and stares at him coolly. “We need to be here in Virginia. Setting up our lives. We can’t change anything.”

“Can’t change anything?” Flynn snorts bitterly. “Isn’t that the fucking point of why we’re here? Fine, I’ll go alone if I have to. You have the keys, you can start getting our house set up. The sort of thing they expect a wife to do in ’69, huh?”

“I cannot let you go to Houston by yourself, on some unplanned recon.” Lucy draws herself up and stares at him coolly. “What happened to being able to trust you?”

“You can,” Flynn insists. “There’s just something I have to do.”

“And that is?”

“We can’t talk about ourselves, Vicky. Remember?”

Lucy experiences a brief and intense urge to strangle him, which is never a good footing for a marriage to start off on, especially this one. Still, if she sets a precedent now that she folds if he pushes enough, this is never going to work, and she stares him down. “I said, you can’t go. We’re supposed to start our jobs at the travel agency next Monday.”

“That’s fine,” Flynn says. “We can start on Monday. I don’t need to go down until July 20.”

“What, are _you_ going to interfere with the moon landing?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You still can’t go. I – ”

“No offense, Vicky.” Flynn pulls on his shirt and starts doing the buttons. “But when it comes to this, I really don’t care what you think.”

Lucy opens her mouth, then shuts it with an angry huff. “Did you _already_ forget everything about why we’re here, about what we agreed to? The rules apply to you, they apply to all of us. Otherwise – ”

“What are they going to do, huh?” Flynn shrugs. “Fire me? I’ll disguise myself. If you want to hold it over me for the next three years until Denise arrives, you can tattle on me then. Otherwise. I think you should pick out some nice linens. Or a sofa.”

With that, he bends to give her a smart-ass kiss on the cheek, which makes Lucy want to push him away, and they pack up their things and go out to their new car, a Chevrolet which definitely does not get any kind of decent gas mileage. They drive into Alexandria and onto the leafy street where their starter house is waiting, a low one-story bungalow with an oak tree in the front yard. They will be expected to earn money (some of which has been seeded in various accounts for them) and upgrade to a proper suburban pad when their family expands. Somewhere with a basketball hoop in the driveway and moms who make cookies.

They get out and go up the drive, unlock the door, and step inside. It’s clean and empty and airy, and Lucy thinks about the utter absurdity of walking in her doctoral graduation ceremony at Stanford a few months ago, class of 2010, and here she is, a floral-headscarfed housewife in 1969, about to start picking out curtain patterns. Obviously, there are plenty of political movements that she (or rather Victoria Taylor) has been involved in around this theme, and she definitely will have a well-worn copy of _The Feminine Mystique,_ but she also can’t get involved in anything too obviously left-wing. The Rittenhouse operatives in D.C. will have a file on anyone who turns up too consistently at these kinds of things, so Lucy is going to have to get used to a lot more casual sexism and misogyny than she, as a modern woman, is really prepared to swallow. Her dearest spouse also does not appear to want to make it any easier. Once more, she says, “Are you really sure you have to – ”

“Yes.” He gives her the sort of look that promises she can let him go, or she can try to stop him, but either way, it’s happening. “I won’t be long.”

Lucy doesn’t answer. She _could_ hold this over him for reporting when their mission starts in ’72; they have a few years to get embedded in, no distractions, so they’ll want to take advantage of that. Come to think of it, she might still. But fine. If it comes to that, she will make it clear that it was nothing to do with her. She for one is committed to this. Isn’t going to hang herself with Flynn’s rope. (Maybe she should start thinking of him as Alex, but that’s something else that’s going to take some time.) Nothing is taking her away from the job.

Over the next few days, they settle in and go furniture shopping. Flynn is actually more helpful than you’d expect, and turns out to have exacting opinions on home décor, so they get the place fitted with the kind of things that Alex and Vicky Mueller would buy. Their neighbors come by to welcome them. There are invitations to barbecues and church socials and Rotary meetings, a few engagements of which they graciously accept. There are fireflies in the evenings, as Lucy stands on the porch in her bare feet, under the new-hanging gardenia pots, and stares out at the streaky candy-colored horizon. The air is thick and somnolent and kids hurry past on their bicycles, baseball cards rattling in the spokes. This is it. Americana.

Inside, she can hear Flynn watching something on their new television, gets a whole four channels and is eighteen inches wide, with rabbit ears that have to be twiddled constantly for proper reception. She can get used to living without the internet and smartphones and a virtual world at your beck and call, though she was still frustrated with the effort of a rotary telephone and a phone book the other day. The sixties, and then the seventies, and then the eighties, are not the worst place to be stuck. It’s familiar. It’s almost like home.

Lucy pauses, then finishes her cigarette and puts it out. Turns around, pastes on a Betty Crocker smile, and goes inside to have sex with her husband.

 

**III.**

Flynn leaves for Houston with no apparent inclination to tell Lucy anything, but the moon landing happens as it’s supposed to. Lucy watches it at the Brownings’ house next door; there’s a big party, casseroles in clunky earthenware dishes, teenagers in bell bottoms and cat-eye glasses, striped-tweed sofas and orange cushions. (Why, oh why, are the sixties so fond of orange? And brown. And mustard. Nobody _likes_ those colors.) _One… small… step… for man… one giant leap… for mankind._ She gets a chill she can barely stand.

The next morning, Lucy puts on high-waisted jeans and a sleeveless polka-dot blouse, ties her hair in a kerchief, and cleans the house top to bottom. Puts the Beatles on in vinyl, because why not embrace the spirit of things, and wonders if she’s supposed to have dinner on the table for Flynn when he gets home. Is that what Vicky Mueller would do? Dabbled in free love and bra-burning as an undergraduate, but has now put that aside, more or less comfortably, to embrace the domestic life? Besides, Lucy really can’t cook. Maybe now is the time to learn how? There’s a _The Joy of Cooking_ on the shelf, though, so. . .

That is how, therefore, Flynn pulls up in the Chevy at six-thirty that night, American Airlines ticket stub stuffed in the handle of his suitcase, to find two fire trucks in front of the house with their lights flashing, firefighters tromping inside, and a rather shell-shocked Lucy standing on the lawn. He jumps out and demands, “Excuse me? What the hell is going on?”

“Are you Mr. Mueller?” The nearest fireman detours over. “Owner of the property?”

“Yes, I am. What’s this?”

“Sorry, sir, it’s all right. Looks like your wife set the stove on fire trying to make dinner.” The fireman allows himself a brief chortle at this bumbling feminine mishap. “It’s all right, there’s no broader damage, but you might have to buy a new stove. Guess she should have taken a few more home ec classes, huh?”

Flynn gives him a dirty look and strides over to Lucy. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.” She doesn’t quite glance up at him. “I’m sorry about the stove.”

“It’s just a stove.” He’s oddly touched that she was trying to cook dinner for him, given how he left. “We’ll go out to a restaurant once they’re done here.”

(They do, and laugh about it ruefully, and it feels like your garden-variety zany newlywed story – _hey, honey, remember the time you set the stove on fire?_ They relax slightly, and smile, and have a few drinks. He does not tell her about Maria Thompkins, about seeing his mother’s face, about saving his half-brother’s life, that he doesn’t give a shit what it changes in the future. They drive home late, and he carries her across the threshold like he’s probably supposed to, and they actually enjoy it a little when they fuck.)

It’s December, and they’ve been here for six months already, when they get hit by the infamous Christmas nor’easter of 1969. D.C. and the Virginia suburbs are blanketed in a foot of snow, everything shuts down, the power goes out at their house for three days, and, well, there is not really a whole lot else to do to pass the time. They eat cold Christmas leftovers and cookies in front of the dark tree, and sometimes they’re Alex and Vicky and sometimes they’re Garcia and Lucy, and they talk about the past – or rather, the future – despite themselves. They also have a lot of sex. They’ve essentially figured out how the other likes it by now, they can connect over that if nothing else, and while it’s certainly not love between them, it’s at least slightly more ease. They’re not total strangers, though they’re not quite friends either. Bonk buddies. Shag hags. Porking pals. (Lucy scoffs and hits his arm when he goes through these.) It turns out, indeed, that gentle is not her métier. She likes it rough.

It, therefore, is the end of January when Lucy starts feeling queasy in the mornings and having mood swings, and the suspicion is in the back of their heads, but can’t quite be uttered out loud. Home pregnancy tests are not yet a thing; they don’t go on the market in America until around 1977, because of “concerns over sexual morality and the ability of women to perform the test and cope with the results without a doctor.” (Take a shot.) There’s not really much to do but wait, and when Aunt Flo doesn’t arrive in another few weeks, Lucy calmly schedules a doctor’s appointment. She won’t let Flynn come with her, it’s not really a thing that fathers do right now. So he sits at home, staring at the wall and suddenly wondering what the hell, what the _hell_ he has done, until she returns. She is extremely matter-of-fact. She is due around the last week of September or the first week of October.

Flynn stares at her, completely at a loss for how to react. Part of him is wild, delirious with joy, cover or otherwise. Another part of him is terrified, and a third part of him wants to call off the entire mission right now and tell her they’ll just run away. Fuck Rittenhouse, fuck the government. They can start over, they’ve done it already. They can have a family.

(And yet. He is well aware that it is what _he_ wants, and that Lucy has obviously never said whether she wanted a family or not, but this is part of the job, so she is going to do it. She is an unyielding iron wall on the subject of whether or not Rittenhouse goes down – for the most part, so is he, but this has shaken him – and she’s certainly not about to back out now.)

Winter becomes spring. The trees bloom, the snow melts, Lucy’s belly grows. She is told she looks just so rosy-cheeked and picture-perfect by various old ladies when she does the shopping, all of whom have some folk trick to suggest to tell whether it’s a boy or a girl. Flynn tries not to hover, he _tries,_ but he finds it increasingly difficult to take his eyes off her, or not know where she is, or control whatever is clawing slowly and terrifyingly into his heart. He knew this was part of the docket – if he’s entirely honest with himself, the thought of a replacement family was a sick sort of consolation prize – but now he’s wondering how he thought he could ever do this and remain neutral. How, _how,_ can he be indifferent toward the woman who is carrying his child, whatever strange and impossible shadowplay their relationship might be? He can’t. He doesn’t have it in him.

It’s summer, and it’s hot, and they’re sitting on the couch watching _Dark Shadows_ (tonight’s episode features a time travel plot, which makes them snort) while Flynn rubs Lucy’s feet. After the episode has ended and the TV turns into snow, they switch it off, and after a pause, she reaches down, pulls up her shirt, and moves his hand to the firm, round curve of her belly. He can see the shape of knobby knees and elbows appearing and disappearing, making brief, butterfly pushes against his palm, can feel it brimming with life like the verdant heart of the jungle. He shifts her around to sit between his legs and cups her stomach with both hands, feeling the ongoing dreamy flutters. He can taste tears in the back of his throat, and leans down to press a kiss to her hair. Wants to sing to the baby in Croatian, the way he did to Iris before she was born, but he isn’t sure that Lucy wants him to.

(How, he thinks. _How._ )

(He still doesn’t have an answer, and if anything, the dilemma is deepening.)

Eleanor Marie Mueller is born at 3:49am on September 30, 1970. Flynn is not in the delivery room, because again, it’s not something fathers do yet, and he stares at the nervous men with their pencil mustaches and their polo sweaters, wondering how they can just sit out here and let their wives go through it alone. God, he hates men right now, how they’re making jokes about balls and chains and hiding the _Playboy_ magazines, about whether she’ll be the same, you know, down there afterward. He gets up and strides down the hall and is about to burst into to be with Lucy and fuck everybody else, but he’s met by a nurse coming the other way to find him. Tells him that he has a daughter, and Mrs. Mueller is doing well.

With that, Flynn breaks every 1970s hospital protocol ever and goes straight to see Lucy, who is tired but satisfied. The baby is washed and wrapped and brought back, and at that instant, both of them fall in powerful and unshakable and unbearable love. It’s still whatever it is with them, it couldn’t be otherwise. But Eleanor – who they’ve named since Vicky, like Lucy, studied history in college and admired Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor Roosevelt – is different. They know at once they’ll die for her. And honestly, they might have to.

They get her home, and put her in the bassinet. Lucy goes to sleep. And Flynn doesn’t give a shit about any of the rules (as he rarely does), and takes Ellie out and holds her on his chest, and tells her all about Lorena and Iris in Croatian, and how they died, and why he came here, and that strictly speaking, she is five years older than him. He may never get to say it again. He has to get it out now.

She sleeps. He can’t breathe. He has never been so happy and so heartbroken in his life.

(God. _How.)_

(The answer is that he can’t.)

 

**IV.**

Ellie is not quite two, and more of a horror than Flynn remembers toddlers ever being, when their number comes up and their lives change.

It’s June 1972, just before the break-in at the Watergate, and they’ve known all along that this is when their real work starts, and the three years of relative peace and quiet are over. Go to a certain spot at a certain restaurant, and a woman will be sitting in the other booth. This woman is Agent Denise Christopher, who has just arrived in 1972 as planned, after three years of intense briefing and preparation on her end to advise them where to go and what to do. Richard Nixon is a leading Rittenhouse member, and they are angling to keep Tricky Dick in office, stop the scandal from ever being broken and leading to his resignation. So Flynn and Lucy have to make sure this does.

It’s not going to be easy. There are dead drops and mysterious packages to retrieve, one-time pads, transmissions to make and receive, and missions to retrieve things that will then be sent on obscure channels, and other traditional spy tradecraft. They have to change their appearances and maintain personas. Being caught will not be good. The entire senior-level administration is Rittenhouse, and there are plots that need to be disrupted. 1972 is a weird time anyway. Planes are routinely hijacked to Cuba every few weeks, and _nobody seems to give that much of a shit about it._ The National Liberation Front and Weather Underground and other groups carry out regular pipe bombings, mostly late at night and with few casualties, so they’re likewise ignored in an era before social media and instant publicity. There are strange people coming and going. Some need to be stopped. Permanently.

Flynn runs most of those, as he’s better with a gun, though Lucy has been training too, and they go together when they can. They can’t always be seen as a unit, though, and Flynn is under orders to cultivate a relationship with Genevieve, the assistant to the acting FBI directors L. Patrick Gray and William Ruckelhaus, succeeding the inglorious basterd J. Edgar Hoover, who just kicked the bucket in May. She is well placed to access all kinds of sensitive intelligence, and can be persuaded. Flynn has to do the persuading, of any type.

He and Lucy don’t talk about that. She has honey-trapped a few men as well, and there will be more. His name is Craig when he’s with Genevieve, his hair is different, he wears glasses, and he’s almost mastered the American accent. There is never any overlap with Alex Mueller, mild-mannered German-American travel agent, and he’s getting intel to disrupt a number of attempted Rittenhouse plots. Gets to shoot three of them in the head in a deserted warehouse, and it feels _good,_ and he knows for a fact he could keep this up for a while.

They work hard through Watergate, leave Ellie in the care of the next-door neighbor who thinks it’s just an exceptionally busy travel season, and feel like they’ve blinked and she’s four by the time Nixon finally does in fact resign on August 9, 1974. They are both guilty over the time they’ve missed with her, and the last two years have been strange. They need each other in a way they can’t quite understand or articulate, and they are less and less sure that they can do this in any way alone.

By Christmas, Lucy is pregnant again. There is something more deliberate about this, more wanting. Flynn doesn’t care who thinks what or whatever comments he gets, and goes with her to all her prenatal appointments and checkups and holds her hand on July 3, 1975, as Max Edward Mueller enters the world kicking and screaming. Flynn has become used to referring to himself as Alex Mueller both aloud and sometimes even in his own thoughts, but it still jolts him to see the name on his children’s birth certificates. _No_ , he wants to say. _Flynn. Your name is Flynn._ The first Fourth fireworks are going off outside the hospital, an all-American baby. Garcia Flynn himself, the original, was born three months ago in Yugoslavia, to Maria Thompkins and Asher Flynn. Does that Garcia have an older half-brother? Saving Gabriel’s life did not stop Maria from leaving America, though her marriage to Asher isn’t going to be particularly pleasant. Is it going to be any better? Does it matter?

Max has a few complications after birth and has to stay in the hospital for a few weeks, and Flynn and Lucy are rarely anywhere else than at his side. When he finally comes home and Ellie is able to hold her baby brother and plant a kiss on his chubby cheek,  Flynn feels his fragile heart spin like a top in his chest. “We paid our dues,” he blurts out. “We did Watergate, we gave them that. But what if we. . .” He stops. “What if we just. . . left?”

Lucy has been watching the children with the same tender expression, but at that, she looks up and frowns, waving at Ellie – she’s a whip-smart almost-five-year-old, she’s well able to remember things and ask awkward questions. Later, in their room, when they can be quite sure that they’re alone, she says, “Alex, you know we can’t do that.”

“We could.” Flynn doesn’t see that his fondness for shooting Rittenhouse agents has to be curtailed by leaving the government’s babysitting – in fact, it feels like it could be much more profitably and interestingly expanded as a freelancer. “We’ve been here for a while, we did all the things that Denise told us. We have money, we could go, and – ”

“No.” Lucy looks at him with that expression that can’t be budged. “We stay here, we finish the fight, and we end them.”

“It’s what, six years we’ve been married? Two kids? And I still have no idea what that is for you. I told you the first night why I wanted Rittenhouse taken down.”

“We don’t need to talk about that.”

“Oh, don’t we?” Flynn lets out a sardonic laugh. “Are you really still that devoted to the _rules,_ Lucy? Or have you gotten used to living as a spy, to keeping secrets, to – ”

Lucy stares at him in shock, until he belatedly realizes he used her name, her real name, for the first time since their arrival. It feels like a live grenade, but he can’t quite bite it back. He reaches for her hand, but she pulls it away. “Why don’t you just talk to me. Why don’t you just tell me what it is. I can help you, I can – ”

“Fine!” Lucy turns to face him, cheeks burning. “Because I was – I was raised Rittenhouse, all right? My mother, Carol, and my biological father, Benjamin Cahill – both of them were in it up to the hilt. I saw what they did, what they were capable of, and in my childhood, there was. . . the entire organization was just very intent that I follow in their footsteps. I’ve seen what they can do, to people and to the world. My sister Amy – half-sister – her father wasn’t Rittenhouse. She wasn’t accorded the same treatment and deference and preparation that I was, and she was very independent-minded. She questioned it and she made me do the same and she was the one who made me see what it really was. They were intending for me to be the heir, the _princess,_ and Amy helped me reject that, everything we had ever grown up with or believed in. So in turn, they. . .”

She stops, her hand tightening almost unwillingly in his. Then she finishes, very calmly, “So they removed her. I got home and found her in the living room. I didn’t have time to call an ambulance. I sat there holding her hand for an hour after she was dead.”

There is a very long pause. They don’t look at each other.

Flynn doesn’t ask why she wants Rittenhouse destroyed again.

The next few years are up and down. Frank and Betty Young arrive from San Francisco, where they now live with their son Malcolm, to help Alex and Vicky run some operations. Frank has shrewdly taken a job at a new technology startup in Cupertino, Apple Computer Inc., that nobody thinks is going to make very much money. Flynn takes Ellie for a daddy-and-me date to a low-budget space opera, _Star Wars,_ that nobody thinks is going to make very much money. (She loves it, because of course she does, and sitting in the theater gives him a kind of powerful ache beyond words.) She is so smart and she’s _seven_ and Iris never was, and she asks uncomfortable questions at school and sometimes also of them. She wants to know why she doesn’t have grandparents, like other children. Where are Mommy and Daddy from? Why do they sometimes do so many weird things?

Flynn and Lucy manage to put her off with relatively child-appropriate explanations, and then somehow it’s 1979 and they’ve been here for ten years. Afghanistan has been invaded by the Soviets and there is revolution afoot in Iran, the American embassy has been stormed and the hostage crisis is ongoing. Carter is president and the economy is in the tank, and as ever, the Cold War threatens to turn hot. Flynn is forty-five, Lucy is thirty-seven, Ellie is nine, and Max is four. They have to juggle being the parents of two energetic young children with all the work that gets heaped onto their backs, scrambling to disrupt the Rittenhouse plots that have been stacked up for this dumpster fire of a year. It deforms and distorts them, makes them harder and darker. They have to kill some old friends, people they have known for a while, when it turns out they were moles and passing information on them. There are bodies in suitcases, dumped with cinder blocks in the Potomac. Lucy is shot once, though not badly. She lies soothingly about it to Ellie, later.

(Christ, they lie, and lie, and there is still no one they can trust but each other.)

It’s October 1980, and Carter is definitely headed down in flames to good ol’ Ronnie Raygun in the election even without Rittenhouse interfering, when Flynn, out for a jog one cold morning, is approached by a pleasant man also in jogging clothes. They have a brief conversation, and a location for a further one is suggested. If he turns up at the diner and orders a certain drink, the news will be passed on, and taken under advisement. That is all. He hopes Mr. Mueller has a nice morning. Goodbye?

Flynn looks at him straight and says, _“Do svidaniya.”_

A brief flicker of something passes over the man’s face, as if pleased that he has grasped the point. He jogs off without another word, and Flynn stares after him. He can’t say he’s surprised, and frankly, he was expecting this to happen sooner. In short, he’s just been felt out by the KGB for the possibility of becoming an informant, and while they probably won’t approach again until he does, you also don’t usually just say “no thanks, have a nice day” to the KGB. It’s D.C. in 1980. There are dozens of Russian spies, open and hidden, in place around the capital and Washington’s covert plans against Moscow. Both sides are convinced the other has a leg up on them in whatever arena the Cold War is being fought in now, and industrial, governmental, and corporate espionage is a cottage industry. And even knowing very well who wins the Cold War, Flynn isn’t entirely sure he wants to say no.

He gets home in a state of total distraction, and Lucy makes an excuse to send the kids off to work on their Halloween costumes, before cornering him in the kitchen. When he tells her what happened, she shakes her head. “Obviously, you’re going to refuse.”

“Am I?” He leans on the sink, dish towel draped over his shoulder. “We’ve been at this for ten goddamn years, and Rittenhouse might be damaged, but it’s not destroyed. I speak Russian, I could adapt fairly quickly. If I could pass information on Rittenhouse to the Soviets, get them to help us target them – ”

“Treason, Alex. You’re talking about treason.” Lucy pauses, lips grim, then looks up at him. “ _Garcia.”_

Likewise, the sound of his real name catches him like a slap across the face. He’s genuinely not sure she has ever used it before, though she’s whispered _Flynn_ in a few intimate moments. They stare at each other, then Flynn shrugs. “Am I? Rittenhouse is embedded everywhere right now. The House, the Senate, the White House again as soon as Reagan gets elected. All the intelligence branches – the CIA, the FBI, the entire foreign service, they’re seventy-five percent Rittenhouse. How do you separate that from America? Maybe America _is_ Rittenhouse, and if it can’t be disentangled – Christ, Lucy, you’re always the one saying that we have to stay and fight to the bitter end, now you’re balking at –”

Lucy bangs open the cupboard and starts putting the dishes on the drain board away. “We’re already in enough danger as it is. And now you’re just going to – ”

“Oh, and since when do you care? Isn’t that against the rules? Or is Rittenhouse still your family, you have to protect mommy and daddy somehow, when you – ”

“Yes!” Lucy whirls on him, a tiny ball of volcanic fury. “Yes. It is my family, in fact, more than you have any idea! Until Ellie and Max were born, I – I was David Rittenhouse’s last living direct descendant, his great-times-several granddaughter. I told you I was the heir, and I meant it. What happened to me growing up, how they tried to ensure that I was a pure-blood believer, what they did – ”

She breaks off, as Flynn feels as if she’s swung a brick into his face. He can’t get enough air. “Ellie and Max – you’re – all of you are _what?”_

“You heard me.” Lucy leans on the counter with both hands, lips white and cheeks blotchy red. “I knew I had to have children. I knew that was part of the bargain for getting to fight them like this. But until they were born – and they’re both older than me, they’re _older_ than me – I was the last one. If I had just died without heirs, if I’d killed myself, I – ”

“No,” Flynn says croakily. “No, Jesus, you shouldn’t have done that.”

“This is. . .” Lucy pulls back from him when he tries to touch her, to catch her by the arms. “I don’t know how you could dare accuse me of having any loyalty to Rittenhouse somehow, still. But if you go over to the Russians – ”

It’s on the tip of Flynn’s tongue to demand of her what exactly she suggests as the proper protocol for refusing them, or if she thinks he’d do it without her. But then a tremulous voice at the doorway says, “Mom? Dad? Why are you shouting?”

They stop and turn around to see Ellie, holding her cardboard-glitter fairy wings, lip trembling. They exchange a guilty glance and go over, trying to comfort her, but once that’s done, they still can’t look each other in the eye. It occurs to Flynn that there’s nothing really holding him here. He could ask Lucy for a divorce, which would be easy since their marriage is not technically legal; they took out the certificate for appearance’s sake, but never actually returned it and filed it, so it only exists as long as they say it does. She can stay here and do her thing however she wants, but he’d be screwed on custody of the kids. No real marriage, no legal support for a divorce, and any court would probably award them to the mother anyway – absolutely so if they heard the father was entertaining overtures from the commies. He cannot, he _cannot,_ lose his children again, and the idea of walking away from Lucy as well turns his stomach. He’d be dead in weeks without her, in any way you want to put it. Much as both of them might push and pull, they are desperately and inextricably bound to each other. Apparently the Project Retro assessments were right. _Most suitable partner._

It sticks in Flynn’s craw, he almost hates it, wishes the goddamn government hadn’t actually been right about something for once. He has to go out for a drive, trying to blow off steam. Circles the block several times (they do in fact live in a new house now, a four-bedroom ranch, symbol of the American dream) and sees that there’s a moving van at the house across the way. Someone must have bought it; it’s been on the market for a couple months. Looks like they’re going to have new neighbors.

The next morning, since damn if they aren’t good at putting on a front, Flynn, Lucy, and the kids go over to introduce themselves, bring brownies and welcome the family – the Logan family, as it turns out – to the block. Wyatt, his wife Jessica, and their son Jake, who is a little older than Max. Moved from Texas. Seem like nice American people.

“What do you do, Wyatt?” Flynn asks. Making friendly conversation.

“Well,” Wyatt says. “I’m a FBI agent.”

Smiles freeze.

You can almost hear the record scratch.

 

**V.**

A FBI agent moving in next door to a pair of double – triple? – agents doesn’t feel like a coincidence. It’s hard to tell if it is.

(Seems like not, but still.)

Over the next few months, Flynn works assiduously on befriending Wyatt. Takes him out for bowling and beer nights, hosts cookouts and football games on TV, guy bonding time, commiserate about the pressures of being a white man in America in the early 80s. Lucy goes over occasionally to chat with Jessica and to let their sons play, delicately trying every so often to see if Wyatt talks about work at home. They don’t know if Wyatt himself is Rittenhouse, but he’s absolutely reporting to someone who is, and they have to take even more care with their operations. Especially since Flynn has gone to that diner and ordered that cup of coffee, and every so often, with Lucy’s tacit, unhappy, unwilling cooperation, one of those operations is for the KGB.

There is absolutely no way they can quantify who they are loyal to, or have been for years, aside from each other. There are more personas, more changing disguises, more shootouts and car chases and fistfights on dark sidewalks, more bodies in alleys and wired up in black plastic bags, in between after-school activities and parent-teacher conferences, T-ball practice for Max and piano lessons for Ellie, family movie nights and household chores. Flynn has never entirely been able to settle on the revelation that his children, who he adores so terribly and risks so much, are blood descendants of the man who founded Rittenhouse in the first place, is the entire reason they are here and fighting, that he and Lucy ever met. It makes no difference to his feelings for them, it never would. And yet.

It’s 1982, and Flynn is starting to feel old when he wakes up in the morning, though right now across the world, in a small bedroom in Croatia, he is the same age as his seven-year-old son. He’s forty-eight now; they told him during the recruitment process that at age thirty-five, he was a little older than they wanted to take in for this project, but given his high level of training and experience, and his valuable all-around ability (and hatred of Rittenhouse) they were willing to make an exception. The bruises don’t vanish as quickly, the sore bones don’t go away between one mission and the next, and Flynn does some simple math in his head. If he assumes he is so lucky as to live to age seventy-five, he will die in 2009, the same year that Lorena and Iris do. His other, original self will go on the trip in 2010, back to 1969. There is something painful, if certainly fitting, about the symmetry. At least he will make it back to his own time eventually, even if as an old man. Maybe he’ll see his grandchildren.

(Maybe.)

There have been a few close calls with Wyatt almost uncovering them, and there are other escapades afoot as well. Rufus and Jiya – that is, Frank and Betty – are back in town, and have to be forewarned. They practically have to keep a flowchart of who knows what. Denise doesn’t know about their side job with the Russians, and the Russians don’t know about Denise. Rittenhouse, hopefully, doesn’t know about them, but there have been too many seemingly minor incidents recently for them to be sure. Rufus and Jiya know about fighting Rittenhouse, but not the rest of it. And as for Flynn and Lucy’s new sometimes-partners, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, well. . .

Ellie is a preteen now, almost thirteen, and she’s definitely independent, precocious, and starting to ask more questions about what exactly her parents do. It’s not altogether clear that she really believes they work at a travel agency. Max is younger and content to let more of it slide; he’s a bombproof, easygoing kid, loves _Star Wars_ and Atari gaming and the Baltimore Orioles. As for Flynn and Lucy themselves, their relationship remains elusive, impossible to precisely define. He has never again asked about leaving, about just moving to Colorado or California or even goddamn Illinois, and frankly, by now he figures that if they don’t take down Rittenhouse at the end of this, there’s nothing that can justify the price they’ve paid. He loves her, however. He has loved her for a while, and perhaps from the day they met. He loves her and he fights for her sometimes far more than for himself. But they just can’t say that, or let themselves relax in that, aside from brief and stolen moments that they don’t talk about later. Not when your entire marriage, the face you put up in the mirror, the name on your driver’s license, the premise and fundament of your existence, is a lie.

It remains unclear what Lucy feels for him, and Flynn has to remind himself not to push. She certainly needs him, is tender with him, knows that they’re a dynamite duo, quite the team. Love is perhaps too far a stretch, though they are very well used to each other by now, can read the smallest signals or shifts in the other’s thoughts or actions. Or perhaps she does love, she loves ferociously, but does not let it out from its cage, and she did not come here to fail, not now, not at the eleventh hour. She came to finish the fight. She is ferocious, primal, singular. She can sometimes be more ruthless than him.

And yet. When you’re lying to this many people for this long, when you’ve already almost died several times, when you’re living next door to an FBI agent and Rufus and Jiya have most worrisomely gone missing, when you wonder if it was a slipup of yours and Rittenhouse has found the sleeper agents working against them, might even be taking notes for further operational purposes, when the closest thing you have to _friends_ are the Russian spies (as Philip and Elizabeth assuredly are) who you collaborate with every so often, when your children have never known your real names or who you are –

(It cracks you, somehow. It corrodes you out. You might have saved the world, but you have lost your entire soul.)

It’s 1983 and it’s the height of the AIDS crisis and Reagan is doing nothing about it, and Flynn and Lucy run a few off-the-books missions of their own to try to kick some asses at the CDC (they’re approving more money to fight Legionnaire’s disease, which kills fifty people a year, then an epidemic currently infecting up to twenty thousand gay men annually – you know why). He’s discovered she’s less into the rules these days. It’s undeniably attractive, and they tend to fuck in the backseat of their car after a successful operation. They are older, perhaps, but more comfortable as well, and things almost seem like they might work out. He woke her up on January 24 this year with a cupcake and a candle – she was just born in San Francisco, though given what she’s said about her childhood, it’s not clear that it’s particularly a good thing. But she’s here now and she exists, and they _have_ their family, and they have technically only signed a fifteen-year contract. If they can make it through the end of 1984, they have served their time, they don’t have to re-up. That was the light at the end of the very long tunnel, what Project Retro promised its recruits. A seven-figure payout, lives elsewhere. They can take Ellie and Max and leave this insanity, and Flynn finds himself dreaming, finds himself _hungering_ for the day, almost counting them down on a calendar –

And then, well, the other shoe drops.

“No,” Lucy says. They’re walking by an underpass in cold November slush, and Denise is not looking at them. It’s been tricky for her to meet them in D.C. in person for the last few years; her younger self is a cop in the capital, was present at Reagan’s attempted assassination, and won’t move to California for another few months, but this is apparently important enough to risk it. “Denise. No, we’ve done this, we’ve done everything – ”

“I’m sorry,” Denise says. She probably is. “Rittenhouse has new branches, they have different operations, and we can’t afford to pull two agents as effective as you. The brass wanted you to take on another fifteen years, but I argued you down until 1990. If you can make it until then – well, Alex, you’ll be over fifty-five, that’s earned retirement age. Then you’ll be almost back to the present anyway, there’s not a lot of sense in risking another time trip, and your pension interest will have accumulated anyway, so – ”

“1990?” Flynn repeats. _“1990?_ That’s another six years.”

“I know,” Denise says. “Again, I’m sorry. But I feel like we might be close to cracking them, and after what happened with Frank and Betty – ”

“Where are they?” It’s not clear if they want to know, but Lucy stops short, cheeks blazing. “What happened to them?”

“We don’t know. We’re trying to find out, we have put every resource we can on it. We don’t think they’re dead, if only because they’d be too valuable for information, but if that runs out, or if they don’t talk. . .” Denise pauses, face shadowed. “It’s broken my heart to see how it’s affected Malcolm, but he has a new foster placement where he’s doing better, and if we can still rescue his parents – ”

“Broken your heart, but you’re still willing to risk it with Ellie and Max?” Flynn struggles not to shout; they have to keep walking, and separate before being spotted together at the major intersection up ahead. “Ellie will be twenty years old in 1990, she’ll be an adult, probably in college. Max will be fifteen. So what, then just – ”

“She’ll be an adult.” Denise seems to grab on that as a defensible point. “You may never have to tell her, or if you do, she’s more able to understand it than as a teenager. I know I’m not asking it lightly, but both of you are committed to ending this, and when we’re so close to a breakthrough – ”

“Six years.” Lucy reaches out, inadvertently grabs Flynn’s hand, and holds hard. “You couldn’t tell us this before?”

“It’s a fluid situation. Fast-changing. We had to make hard choices about which personnel were needed where, and I assure you, asking more from you was not decided on lightly. You should take it as a compliment. You’ve done good work.”

“That sounds like bullshit.” Flynn is half-tempted to throttle her, important government official or otherwise. “I don’t see you living here. You get to go back and forth from your – from our – original time. What year is it in the present now, anyway?” Time technically can’t pass twice, so it could have been anywhere from a few months, still 2010, to a matching span of fifteen years, or hell, even longer, since they went. Denise can arrive to visit them whenever she wants, by dint of choosing her arrival slot. “How far have we gotten?”

Denise pauses, then says crisply, “It’s the year 2018. Eight years after you left. Rittenhouse is weakened, we’ve taken bites out of their historical structure and operation. As I said. Do you want to finish this or not?”

Flynn and Lucy exchange a look. They know that there’s no possibility of refusing, not really, no matter how much sugar Denise is trying to spoon on the bitter pill. Their only chance of doing so, in fact, is to tell her they are part-time KGB agents, which would absolutely lead to them getting yanked, court-martialed, and thrown into military prison, never to be seen again. (If the KGB didn’t silence them more permanently for going to confess, which is absolutely also an option.) And they definitely can’t do that to Ellie and Max, not when they’ve already kept so much from them. Six more years it is.

After they have given Denise their word, and she has walked on ahead of them, out of sight on the pedestrian path, Flynn and Lucy stand where they are. They feel stunned and numb and hollow. They continue holding hands, shivering in the cold wind. It is six days until Thanksgiving, and they have never felt less grateful in their lives.

“We were so close,” Lucy says at last, voice aching with the loss of it. “So close.”

“I know.” Flynn has nothing to say to make it better, not when he feels it just as terribly. He opens his jacket and wraps it around her, and she steps in, wrapping her arms around his waist and holding him tightly. He rests his chin on her head and tries to memorize every detail, as he does whenever Lucy lets him hold her in an unguarded moment. He wants to rage, he wants to shout, but he knows what good it will do (which is to say, none). They continue to stand there. _1984._ Orwell knew what he was about, calling it a dangerous year.

Voice muffled into his chest, Lucy says, “I want to tell the kids.”

Flynn hesitates. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Not everything. Just that we’ve been working for the government in a certain capacity, and we thought we were going to be able to leave, and. . . we can’t. And about Rittenhouse. Just enough to let them know what we really do.”

“Ellie’s fourteen. Max is nine. We tell them there’s a dangerous secret society controlling America, and that they’re descended from it, and that Mom and Dad actually spend all those late nights killing people and stealing information?” Flynn can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “I know we’ve had problems with Ellie recently, but if this is something that we lay on their shoulders now – do you honestly think they’re going to just – ”

“I don’t know,” Lucy says. “But I’m so tired of lying to them, Garcia. Aren’t you?”

As ever, his real name catches him like a devastatingly effective boot in the chest. He looks down at her smoothing the silver-threaded dark hair out of her eyes, which have a few lines framing them. She is, if anything, more beautiful to him than ever, and he almost can’t stand the sight. Finally he says, “And what? Tell them who we really are? About the time traveling? They’re going to think we’re absolutely crazy.”

“Maybe, but. . . they’re at the age where we might be able to get through to them, we could give it a try. We just. . .” Lucy trails off again. “We have to do something. We were hinting at moving, about changing things, and. . . please.”

He can’t refuse her. He never can.

Hoarsely, he says, “All right.”

 

**VI.**

It’s over Thanksgiving dinner, over turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and gravy, the football game on in the background, that Lucy says, “Kids, we’d like to talk.”

Ellie and Max lift their heads from their plates and stare at her warily. “Oh God,” Ellie says. “You’re not pregnant, are you? Kelly’s mother just had a baby and it’s totally ruined her life, and I don’t want another – ”

“No, I’m not pregnant.” Lucy stares at her daughter with a raised eyebrow.

“Are we moving?” Max asks. “You said we might be moving. I don’t want to move, I like it here. Jake and me are in Little League now, I can’t – ”

“No. This is going to sound. . . very strange.” Lucy glances at Flynn, and he takes her hand. “But we need to tell you some things about what we do, and who we – who you are.”

It is an excruciating conversation. It was never going to be otherwise. It takes a long time to explain the Rittenhouse stuff, and even longer to explain the time travel. Ellie sits there with a muscle working in her cheek, while Max laughs at first, convinced it’s a funny story. Then he stops and frowns, and starts to look concerned, and finally grabs onto the sides of his chair as if he thinks they might rush at him and attack. “You’re not. . .” He goggles at them. “Mom, your name’s _not_ Victoria? And Dad isn’t. . . your name isn’t Alex?”

“No,” Lucy says quietly. “My name – my real name – is Lucy. Lucy Preston. But you can’t tell anyone that, all right? It has to stay in this house. Dad’s name is Garcia. Garcia Flynn.”

Both of the children flinch. “So our name. . .” Max frowns. “Our name isn’t Mueller?”

“It still is.” Flynn raises his eyes to them with a haunted expression. “That is the name I had to give you.”

The muscle in Ellie’s cheek works harder, but she still doesn’t say anything. Lucy slowly reaches a hand across the table for her. “Sweetheart?”

Ellie jerks it back. A tear wells up and falls with a plink on her plate. Then another one. Low and furiously, she says, “You’ve been lying to us our entire lives? About this? About these Rittenhouse people? About – about _time travel?_ And now you want us to just – what? Tell you that’s all right? It’s not. It’s not!”

“I know it’s a lot.” Lucy chooses her words carefully, eager to avoid another confrontation. “A _lot._ But we still love you and your brother more than anything, that has never been a lie, it never will. We have tried so hard to protect you and give you a life and – ”

“You _love_ us?” Ellie’s lip curls, and she looks very frighteningly like her father in one of his darkest rages. “Is that what you’re calling it? I don’t think so. And you know what? I don’t. I hate you. I _hate_ you.”

Lucy looks like she’s been stabbed, and Flynn catches at her arm. To Ellie he says, “Apologize to your mother right now, young lady.”

“Apologize?” Ellie cries, face burning red, eyes flooded with tears. _“Apologize?_ I’m not apologizing to you! I never am! You know what, I’m leaving. I’m _leaving!”_

With that, she pushes her chair back and runs up the stairs, as both Flynn and Lucy start to their feet after her. They hear drawers banging and  doors slamming, until Ellie comes back downstairs with her things packed in her rollaway suitcase, school backpack slung on her shoulder. “I’m going to Mr. and Mrs. Logan’s, I’m going to tell them that you’re crazy! And then we can see if you’re really going to – ”

“No.” Flynn reaches for her. “Eleanor Marie Mueller, you cannot go over to the Logans’ house, you cannot tell them about this, you’ll destroy our entire family if you do – ”

 _“Mueller?”_ Ellie spits. “We all know that’s not my name, don’t we? Fine. I guess I’ll just find this Denise person and ask if she can place me with Malcolm Young. Anything is better than staying here with a couple of _liars!”_

Flynn and Lucy both start toward her, their faces a mask of distress –

 – but Ellie dodges away, runs down the hall, and slams the door so hard that it shakes.

Of course, they don’t let their fourteen-year-old daughter run away from home on Thanksgiving night. They get in the car with Max and drive after her and catch up with her a few blocks away, roll down the window and remonstrate with her to please just get in, get in. They can go home and make hot chocolate and talk about this. Please, _please._ Please.

It’s cold, and Ellie is still only fourteen, and finally she does get in the car and lets them take her home. But an icy silence pervades the entire way, and she goes up to her room, slams the door, and won’t come out for the rest of the holiday weekend. Normally they go to get their tree and put it up, but nobody is talking to anyone, and the atmosphere in the house is excruciating. Lucy lies on their king-sized bed in the master bedroom, feeling like her back has been broken – this was her idea, she insisted on it, and she isn’t sure their family is ever going to be the same again. Six more years of this? Six more years? She wants to finish Rittenhouse, she has never once wavered in that commitment and she has done far more and far worse things than she ever thought she could have in pursuit of that goal, but for the first time, she wonders if it will ever be enough. How can it be? How can it stop? Is it going to be another six years after that, and after that, until they die?

Flynn lies next to her, not saying a word, not rubbing salt in the wound, just offering wordless comfort, and Lucy rolls over and buries herself into him, as he wraps his arms around her. She knows beyond all doubt that she can’t live without him anymore, and she doesn’t want there to be any more secrets between them, or any other personas and the people they have to sleep with. It’s been harder and harder for both of them to carry out that part of the job, and yet. The only way to stop is to quit, to leave the fight before it is won, and they just said they can’t, they won’t do that. But how can they possibly give this war anything more than they have? They have sacrificed it all, over and over, wounds too deep to heal, scars that sear their fingers and their lips and their hearts and souls. For what? Each other? Their children? That’s something, to be sure. And it might be the only thing they have left.

Lucy strains with all her might to remember Amy’s face, the reason she swore herself to this, that she never stopped. She knows it. She certainly knows it.

It’s a familiar, warm-featured blur. Try as she might, she cannot recall it.

Flynn’s face, though. Flynn’s face is more familiar to her than her own, than the breath in her body, than the warp and weft of her soul, the spaces between her atoms, and it is undeniably the case – has been so for a while, perhaps since the day they met – that if she is fighting for anything, she is fighting for him.

Very softly, face still in his neck, Lucy whispers, “I want to get married. For real.”

For the longest moment, Flynn doesn’t move or react or respond in the slightest. She almost thinks he didn’t hear her. Then once, just as he did that first night when she asked if he could trust her, after he has kept that promise faithfully and steadfastly for the better part of twenty years, he nods.

 

**VII.**

That, therefore, is what they do. It’s in the new year, March 1985. The Cold War is in its waning days; Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the USSR by the Politburo just a week ago, and _perestroika_ and _glasnost_ will begin next year. Maybe they can leave the KGB part of their jobs soon, though they have neither asked nor been told anything about what their information has been used for. Possibly to target Rittenhouse, possibly just for Russian interests, and there is nothing costume-jewelry about the treason they have engaged in. They have passed critical high-level intelligence. Wyatt’s casual conversation seems to be getting increasingly pointed. Yes, he’s lived next door to a pair of spies for five years and hasn’t noticed anything, seems kind of like a shit FBI agent really, but he has had a lot on his mind. He and Jessica have gone through a separation and estrangement, she moved out, he lost custody of Jake for a while. There’s been drama at work too. He’s been involved in the Russian operatives hunt. Got in a little too deep, by the sound of things.

Flynn and Lucy, meanwhile, are concocting their plan to escape. They get married in a courthouse ceremony (Ellie won’t go, she still barely speaks to them) and are trying to find a way to liquidate their assets without sending up red flags. They’ll need to sell the house, probably move cross-country or maybe to Canada, scrub everything and maybe actually, in all the ironies, start over under their real names, since “Alexander and Victoria Mueller” have become too compromised. But there is one last Rittenhouse mission they both want to take, _have_ to take, if there’s any chance of striking a fatal blow, and –

Of course, that’s about when the KGB gets back in contact. They have been doing a little digging of their own. Seems they can’t find who exactly Alex and Vicky are, or who they have ever been. Are beginning to suspect they’ve been played (which they haven’t, since Flynn and Lucy have gotten them their information in good faith, but that’s the risk they have always taken). Have essentially issued them with an ultimatum to finish one last mission for them as well, or it’s curtains for them and their whole family. And frankly, might be anyway. The KGB isn’t into leaving witnesses. Or loose ends.

“We shouldn’t have gotten mixed up with the fucking Russians,” Flynn says, in the tone of a man from former-Yugoslavia who should have known better, probably did, and broke his cardinal rule anyway. “You’re right. I’m sorry. We wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for me.”

“It’s a little too late for that now, isn’t it?” Lucy’s mouth twists. They sit on their bed, holding hands in the dark, listening to cars pass on the street outside and tensing every time one seems to be idling too long. “We have to get the kids out. Denise gave us an address in California where we could send them if this – ”

Her voice catches briefly, and she steadies it. Finishes coolly, as ever. “If this was in any danger of happening. I don’t think it’ll be any trouble to get Ellie to go.”

Flynn shakes his head, less as an actual disagreement than in helplessness and heartbreak that this is what it’s come to. “So what? We’re trusting Denise to take care of our children?”

“Do we have a choice?” Lucy hesitates, then lies down in his lap, letting him cradle her head. “Get them out ahead of Rittenhouse and the Russians, and they might have a chance. We owe it to them, Garcia. You know we do.”

Flynn doesn’t answer. His left hand folds over hers, brushing the metal of their wedding rings, their real ones. “God,” he says at last, very quietly. “What have we done, Lucy?”

“I don’t know.” Lucy feels tears bubbling behind her eyes, as if after years and years, they might finally fall. “I don’t know.”

They make arrangements. They tell the kids as much as they can, that Ellie and Max need to go to California, and that they will join them there as soon as it’s possible. Ellie has been burningly mad at them for months, and shows little sign of changing that position now, but even she wavers slightly at the thought of actually being parted from them. “How long?” she asks at last. “How long is it going to take?”

Flynn and Lucy exchange a look.

(What’s one more lie by now? Nothing. Nothing, and everything.)

“Not long, honey,” Lucy says. “Not long.”

Ellie and Max pack up that night, and Flynn and Lucy drive them to Dulles the next morning. They manage to put up a good front as they pull up to the curb, they find the airline, they get them out and smile and straighten Max’s coat and Ellie’s braids, kiss them and hug them and tell them that they’re so proud and remember who to meet in California. It’s nice there, it’s  much warmer, they’ll like it, they’ll be settled in before they know it. They walk them to the gate (it’s 1985, airport security is not what it will be) and wave them on board the flight, and keep smiling the whole time. Then they barely make it back to the car before Lucy completely and comprehensively breaks down. Sobs so hard that she retches, barely makes a sound, clawing at Flynn’s arms as he struggles to hold her and can’t say a word to make it easier. They both know they are never going to see their children again.

He finally puts the car in gear, and drives down the airport parkway. They can’t really go home, not when it’ll be part of Ellie and Max’s protection that everything looks normal. But they drive past it on the street, staring out at it like a stranger’s house, when all they want to do is pull inside and go and get into bed and dare the KGB to break the door down. Or Rittenhouse, or anyone. Lie there, and wait for the world to end.

They’re expected at six o’clock that evening. If it feels like a date with the executioner, there is very much a reason for that.

They look at the empty shell of their house, at their entire life, for a long, impossible moment more. Then they take a deep breath, and square their shoulders. Drive down the neat residential street, and Flynn stops at the stop sign. The world is green and grey and gold, the wet sunlight of early spring, and he doesn’t want to die, he doesn’t want to die, he doesn’t. He wants to be flying to California with his wife, and getting off to hug his son and daughter, and promising that they will go to Disneyland. His heart aches with it.

But they have, after all, not come to quit now.

They never have.

They never will.

 

**VIII.**

They finish the last mission against Rittenhouse and for the Russians, if by that you mean they double-cross both of them. They run their planned operation, and then they break out and call a certain number, and then they get the fuck out of there as a dozen KGB agents descend on the warehouse containing just as many Rittenhouse agents and the computer mainframe they need to install to complete their final-phase operation. The end result is, of course, a shootout, with the Russians and Rittenhouse offing each other in spectacular fashion, and Flynn and Lucy can almost be proud of how well that worked. But of course, there is nowhere for them to go now. They have burned all their bridges; this is drastically against everything Denise told them to do, and they’ve caused considerable damage to their own handlers as well, as well as revealing themselves to have been long-term Russian agents. This is it – the perverse, naked truth. After so long, it is almost liberating.

They sit on a rooftop not far away and watch it unfold. The FBI is swooping in, and it’s getting even messier, and three whole city blocks might be cordoned off for days. They can see smoke rising, and wonder if Ellie and Max will see this on the news in California, and if they will put two and two together. Do they know by now? Do they suspect? Or do they –

_“You.”_

Flynn turns slowly, almost too slowly, at the sound of the voice, which only sounds incidentally like his neighbor and friend’s. Puts his hand on his own gun, reaches his other arm out to shield Lucy, and both of them turn around to see a white-faced Wyatt Logan in his FBI jacket, gun out and pointed at them. It’s clear from his eyes that he can see all the pieces crashing into place, about all the signs he missed, the clues he overlooked. “Get up,” he says. “On your feet. Drop the gun.”

Flynn hesitates, then does so, just because he doesn’t want them to die like this. He isn’t sure if Wyatt will pull the trigger or not, but he keeps his arm in front of Lucy. “Evening.”

Wyatt doesn’t answer. Takes a breath, then another, trying to wrap his head around this, and he still can’t. “We were friends,” he says. “Beer nights. Sympathy when things were rough with Jess. And all the time – what? It was an act? How many people have you two been working for?”

“Enough.” Flynn doesn’t take his eyes off him. “For what it’s worth, I did like you. A little.”

Wyatt snorts bitterly, as if to say this only salts the wound. He raises the gun, training it on Flynn’s head – it’s less than ten feet, he can barely miss. “Fuck you, Mueller. No, that’s not your real name, is it? Can’t be. Like those other ones we caught, Frank and Betty, they were just aliases. Or did you – ”

“Frank and Betty,” Flynn says. “What happened to them?”

“They. . .” Wyatt clearly can’t believe that he is standing here and accounting himself to them. “They were spies, they’d been working to destabilize America. They – ”

“Rittenhouse.” They have nothing to lose now, obviously, and Lucy speaks up. “It’s what we’ve been fighting, all this time. They run half the FBI, possibly more. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the name, but maybe you should ask. What happened to Frank and Betty?”

“They’re still alive somewhere, I think.” Wyatt continues to point the gun. “Some prison. What, you’re going to tell me they’re innocent, they – ”

“Reopen their case,” Lucy says. “You’re going to find out some very important things if you do. You need to be the one to carry on the fight, all right? Denise Christopher – you haven’t met her yet, but you will, she’ll be here in a few days.”

“And I’m listening to you why?”

“Because you have to.” Flynn’s voice is flat and cool and completely uncompromising. “Because she’s coming from the future.”

That, obviously, knocks Wyatt for six. After a long pause, he says, “So you are crazy.”

“I’m guessing you read some of Frank and Betty’s transcripts?” Flynn takes a step. “You saw what they said, didn’t you? If you bastards left them in any state to talk.”

Wyatt can’t answer that. The muzzle of the gun wavers. “Who the hell,” he says at last. “Who the _hell_ are you people, really?”

“Our names are Garcia Flynn and Lucy Preston,” Lucy says. “Frank and Betty were Rufus Carlin and Jiya Marri. We are – we will be – with a government program called Project Retro. It hasn’t happened yet, not until the year 2010. We’re time travelers. I know it sounds insane, but it’s the truth. And now – well, we’re dead. We’ve made enemies of everyone powerful in D.C., and then some. We’re done. If this fight is going to be carried through, you have to help us.”

“I don’t have to do anything.” Wyatt’s voice is less steady than it used to be. “Only – ”

“Fine,” Flynn says. “Then shoot me. If you can bring yourself to do it.”

The silence crackles, potent as a lightning strike. They continue to stare at each other. The moonlight comes out from behind a cloud, casting them both in eerie silver. Then Wyatt says, “If this – if this is true, why didn’t you just. . .” He pauses, considers the answer to his own question, and shakes his head. “Triple-agent, time-traveling, on-the-side KGB agents fighting half the American government? Yeah. Okay.”

“Do you believe us?”

“I don’t believe shit.” Wyatt’s voice is rough. “But you were my friends – and Jess’s. Our sons played Little League together. I’ll tell them I lost you up here. But I never want to see you in D.C. again. Got it?”

Flynn and Lucy look at each other, and nod.

Wyatt pulls his gun away, and stands aside. Doesn’t look at them, doesn’t move, as they walk past him, and down the stairs, and into the night.

Sirens scream behind them. Lights flash blue and red. They walk at an unhurried pace, hand in hand. They don’t look back, and they don’t look forward. They’re, as they said, dead. They could go to California, perhaps, and see Ellie and Max, and selfishly try to delay the inevitable. But the only way that would end is with either Rittenhouse or the Russians storming in and assault-rifling all of them, and neither of them can stand to lose their family twice over. There is one last gift they can give their children: that of a clear and public demise, with Wyatt on hand to confirm both their real names and their aliases. Call off the dogs, end the hunt. It’s going to take a leap of faith, literally. But they took one once with coming out here, got into a time machine with a stranger and started this war. It’s only fitting that this is how it ends.

They walk out onto the Interstate 395 bridge over the Potomac. It’s chilly, and the night is dark, though the endless city lights sparkle like earthbound stars. From here, looking south, they can almost pick out Alexandria. They stand there looking for several long minutes, the wind blowing the tears off their cheeks, then turn to each other, take hold, and kiss desperately, as if they can’t stop (and perhaps they can’t, because that brings them to the culmination). “I love you,” Lucy whispers, her cheek against his, her chest silently heaving. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

It bursts out as if for all the sixteen years she has not said it, and Flynn wants to answer, but his heart is too broken and his throat too choked. Instead he nods. Then steps back, and climbs up on the railing. It’s a long way to the dark water below, but that’s all right. He reaches out a hand for her, and helps her up alongside him. Perched up here, it almost feels as if they can fly, and they will. God, it is a beautiful night. From here, even the sirens are faint.

“Do you think – ” Lucy stops. “Do you think it’s going to hurt?”

“No.” Flynn takes hold of her face and looks at her. “I love you, Lucy. I always have. I should have told you before. You are my greatest, my best, my truest love, and I don’t regret anything about this. About us. I just wish we could. . .” It’s his turn to crack. “I wish we could see Ellie and Max grow up.”

“We could,” Lucy whispers. “We’re alive right now. You’re ten years old, and I’m two. We’ll still live in the same world with them even – even after. Maybe we’ll meet.”

“Maybe.” Flynn wants to believe it, more than he has ever wanted anything. Any longer, and perhaps his courage will fail him. He stands up on the edge, and reaches out to take Lucy’s hands with both of his own as they face each other. They’re crying, they’re crying as if they can’t stop, but they aren’t making a sound, as the tears roll down their faces and fall, fall, fall to the water below. Up here on the girder, they are weightless, breathless, buoyant, free.

“I love you,” Lucy says again. Her face wrenches, crumples, but she’s smiling. A little, somehow. “I love you, Garcia. I love you.”

He nods. Senses that she needs him to do it, she needs him to take the step off, and this is the last thing he can do. So he pulls her against his chest, and whispers, “Close your eyes.”

Out of the black, and into the blue.

 

**IX.**

Eleanor and Max Mueller are informed of their parents’ deaths three days later, by a uniformed police officer and a social service worker. They are sorry, they are very sorry. If there is anything they can do, they do hope they will let them know.

Ellie is in a daze for hours, for days, for months after. She goes into autopilot, throws herself into school and into her new life. She pretends she’s fine, she’s doing well, that she understands it all. She is angry and then she’s heartbroken and then she’s completely wrung out and empty in turns. Max seems to be taking it better, or maybe he’s better at compartmentalizing. Until she finds him sobbing one night, and then they both break down and it’s stupid and it’s raw and it’s impossible and terrible to get through, and they can’t, they just can’t, they _can’t._ It’s not fair. It’s not fair, it’s not, it’s not.

And yet, as it does, life somehow trickles and staggers and lurches on. They are adopted by their foster parents, and Ellie graduates from high school as valedictorian, gets accepted to Caltech to study science and engineering (in 1988, this is still quite an accomplishment). At her graduation four years later, she’s approached by a couple in late middle age, who introduce themselves as Frank and Betty Young and say they were friends of her parents. Does she know what that means?

Ellie does, and she feels a little more like she wants to finally talk about it. She has started the process to legally change her name to Flynn, and Max has done the same. He seems to bear their parents less resentment than Ellie does, and he thinks it would be nice. But that’s how Ellie finds herself in a restaurant with Frank and Betty, who tell her that their real names are Rufus and Jiya, and her parents saved their lives, indirectly. They tell her about what’s gone on with something called Rittenhouse, and an FBI agent named Wyatt Logan. It’s weakened, if not destroyed, and some things are still going to have to happen.

Rufus and Jiya explain as much as they can, all the answers Ellie wanted from Mom and Dad, and she finds herself missing them so horribly she can barely speak. She stares at the menu until her eyes blur, and she cries in the restaurant, and then she walks home after in a trance, thinking about everything until her head aches. Maybe she understands a little more, now. She can’t say she entirely forgives them, but she understands.

Ellie moves on with her life. She gets a master’s degree and then a doctorate, becomes a powerhouse in quantum physics and experimental mathematics, and has a few faculty positions, including one at Stanford. She gets married in 1998, though they end up divorcing in 2001; he just wasn’t on her level, and she doesn’t want to accept anything less. A few weeks later, she is contacted by Connor Mason, a billionaire inventor and tech genius, who wants to know if she wants to leave academia and get a different kind of job.

By now, Ellie could use a change, and she accepts. Max has graduated from college as well and moved to Europe to do something exciting, and she feels like she might be letting life pass her by, outside the ivory tower. Then she walks in for her first day on the job, and hears what Mason is working on, and all of a sudden, she almost wants to laugh.

(She almost wants to cry too, but that is something else.)

Ellie spends the next eight years of her life developing the time machine, writing half the codes and the software algorithms for it. She gets her first real shock when Rufus, the Rufus she knows, dies in 2006, she goes to his funeral and grieves, and then three days later, a younger version of himself walks in the door and joins on the project. She can’t tell him how she knows him, or that she does, and yet, the realization coils ever tighter in her stomach. And with it, something so excited she can’t stand it, and this time, it is her turn to count the days. Project Retro has started. Mason is in on it. All this time, the weakened remnants of Rittenhouse has been convinced that he’s building the time machine for them, that he’s going to hand it over and return them to their former glory. He’s taken plenty of their money and given them every indication that this is the case. They have no reason to think otherwise.

(Don’t underestimate Connor Mason. It’s easy to, but you shouldn’t.)

It’s a day in 2010 as Dr. Eleanor Flynn, respected forty-year-old scientist and dazzling genius, trailblazer for women in STEM, is looking over the dozen shortlisted candidates for Project Retro, and feels her heart turn over. After all this time, after everything, she finally knows beyond all doubt that it was true, it was all true, and she feels it turn into place like a key. She isn’t supposed to make contact with any of the candidates, and she doesn’t. And yet.

She goes up to the walkway over the warehouse floor, and waits, feeling like a kid on Christmas, standing just out of sight in the shadows. Then all at once, she sees them, and it is as if light has opened up from the heavens, and shone on the face of the deep.

Dad is younger, dark-haired, still kind of grumpy-looking, wearing a brown corduroy suit and a paisley shirt (even he can’t quite pull it off) and carrying a battered suitcase. Mom is beautiful, of course, in pearls and sweater set and skirt, and Eleanor’s breath catches in her throat. She half-thinks she must have made a sound, she must have said something, made a noise, even as tears roll silently down her face. The younger Rufus and Jiya are coming now as well, getting into the machine, and Lucy stops and looks up, frowning. As if she’s seen someone, just for a moment. Then she shakes her head and gets inside.

Eleanor kisses her fingers and blows them at her, just as Dad follows Mom up the steps. Eleanor is smiling so hard now that her face hurts, pressing her knuckles to her mouth, gasping and trying not to sob out loud, wanting to wish them godspeed, wanting to tell them that she loves them, she loves them, she _loves_ them. But they will feel that, she thinks. Love will find them, and it will never leave. It is stronger than time. Stronger than death.

She stands there as the door closes, and the gyro of the time machine begins to spin. Faster and faster, faster and faster. Then it flashes out of existence, the fabric of reality bends its head as gently as an old dog coming to lie down and rest, and they are gone.


End file.
